hi everyone! We had our AABB inspection yesterday and had one deficiency for labeling during downtime. Since we are on ISBT now, how do people ensure appropriate labeling of products during a downtime?

Thanks for your help!

what are you labeling?  r u a donor center or transfusion service. What does ISBT have to do with labeling a unit for transfusion?  If it is for a patient do  you use a transfusion tag or compatibility label? 

Edited September 1, 20168 yr by David Saikin
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we are a transfusion service.

If you modify products and generate a isbt label with your current system you must have a downtime procees as well.  There are standalone isbt label maker software on the market that can be purchased. Just make sure you have a good procedure written and warn your staff that their is no logic or checks that a correct label is being generated with the downtime software.  

 

I am curious as to what exactly you were cited for.  I am not sure about downtime ISBT labeling, but I would think that if (for example) you thawed a unit of fresh frozen plasma during a downtime, it would be adequate to write "thawed plasma" on the unit if you could not generate a new label.

 

Scott

Hi. The assessor looked in our label book and all we had were codabar labels and no ISBT labels. That is why she cited us.

Hello From Digi-Trax;

We have Stand-Alone PC software, thermal transfer printer and label supplies to print all ISBT128 compliance labels on-demand.  In addition if you have an automated Blood Bank Information System (BBIS) you can contact them directly to get the integrated version from your BBIS company.

To add, I have used both Soft and Cerner and within it there is a label verification process in which you scan the newly created ISBT label to make sure that it is correct before being placed on the unit or before dispensing the unit. If for some reason they scan something incorrectly you can set it to automatically Quarantine the unit after x number of tries.

cthherbal---they are discussing downtime .....how can you do BLV during downtime?

You can also purchase pre-printed ISBT product labels for whatever modified products you make.  This gets messy if you aliquot because of all of the A0, B0 etc. labels you would need.  If you irradiate, you have to have labels for all of the various products you might end up with or limit irradiation to your most common product codes.  If you are pooling plts or cryo that is messy this way too.  Ask your supplier for pre-pooled products.

The HemaTrax  "Stand-Alone" system can generate all ISBT128 compliant labels from blank stock during down time and emergency release circumstances if you wish to have an on-demand system.

Computype used to have a label printing system too.  It's been a lot of years since I looked at it.

We use HemaTrax.  It is easy to set up and use, and the same software is 'embedded' in SafeTrace.

Computype no longer has the on-demand printing system.

Yep Hematrax here too